Voice For Liberty

Tag: Economics

  • Kansas Affordable Airfares program: Benefits and consequences

    To keep airfares low at the Wichita Airport, the Wichita City Council in partnership with Sedgwick County and the State of Kansas pays a discount air carrier to operate in Wichita. While the program almost certainly works with regard to airfares, there is another effect of the program: The trend of flights and seats available in Wichita is declining, and faster than for the nation as a whole.

    Today I appeared and presented the council this information. The article holding my charts and an interactive visualization of the data is Wichita airport statistics: the visualization.

  • The harm of business welfare

    What is the effect of the issuance of business welfare in Wichita, of the intervention in the economy by politicians? Based on an article by Bob Weeks, Amanda BillyRock illustrates — literally — the harm caused when government intervenes in the economy. Thanks also to Henry Hazlitt for the insights in his simple but imposing book Economics in One Lesson.

  • ‘Economics in One Lesson’ explains today’s economics

    Economics In One Lesson
    Henry Hazlitt

    Economics In One Lesson, first published in 1946 and reissued by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, explains fallacies (false or mistaken ideas) that are particularly common in the field of economics and public policy.

    At the very start of the book Hazlitt explains:

    Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine — the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for then plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

    In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

    At first it seems as though not much has changed since the end of World War II. What has changed, however, is the scope of the dangers Hazlitt identifies. That’s because government is much expanded and more intrusive today than when this book was written. We should take these lessons as even more important today.

    It is overlooked consequences that cause harm. They are overlooked sometimes because they are difficult to see, as in the broken window fallacy explained by Frederic Bastiat and also in this book. They are also “overlooked” because, as Hazlitt tells us, one group wants special favors from the government, and because there is no way to grant these favors without harming some other group, the favor-seeking group will seek to hide, obfuscate, muddle, or minimize the bad effects. At the same time they will promote the policy as good for everyone. This is roughly the job lobbyists perform, and billions are spent on it each year. That’s because a powerful government has the ability to bestow valuable favors, but those favors are paid for by someone else, someone often not easily seen.

    These two ideas — the special pleading of selfish interests and the overlooking of secondary consequences — are the core ideas of the book. As Walter Block explains in his introduction (This Book is So Me) to the Mises Institute’s new edition of this book:

    … the plan of Economics in One Lesson is clear: drill these insights into the reader in the first few chapters, and then apply them, relentlessly, without fear or favor, to a whole host of specific examples. Every widespread economic fallacy embraced by pundits, politicians, editorialists, clergy, academics is given the back of the hand they so richly deserve by this author: that public works promote economic welfare, that unions and union-inspired minimum-wage laws actually raise wages, that free trade creates unemployment, that rent control helps house the poor, that saving hurts the economy, that profits exploit the poverty stricken; the list goes on and on.

    An example of overlooked secondary consequences is government spending. When government spends, it must tax or borrow. What government spends is not available for individuals to spend. When we see magnificent public works (say a new downtown arena in Wichita), we don’t see all the things that would have been bought had the government not taxed to build the public work. We see the jobs created by the public work — all the construction workers that built the new arena — but we don’t see the jobs destroyed because people had to reduce their spending elsewhere.

    Foreign trade is a case where people often fail to grasp the complete picture. We often see exports as something good for our economy, while imports are seen as bad. Imported things are things that American workers can’t compete with, and so American jobs are lost, it is often said. But as Hazlitt says: “It is exports that pay for imports. The greater exports we have, the greater imports we must have, if we ever expect to get paid. The smaller imports we have, the smaller exports we can have. Without imports we can have no exports, for foreigners will have to funds with which to buy our goods.” So those wanting restrictions on imports are also calling for fewer exports — although they do not say this, either because they do not recognize it or it doesn’t matter to them.

    In recent years we have been told that our is a “consumer-driven” economy, fueled by people tapping their home equity that accumulated from increased home values, or spending by going into debt. It is as though if consumers started saving rather then spending on immediate consumption, the American economy would collapse. But Mr. Hazlitt tells us that “saving is only another form of spending.” After all, what is done with money that is saved? Today, few put their savings under the mattress. Instead, it is loaned to a bank or invested. Then it is spent on capital goods, which businesses use to increase their productive capability. The key fact is that businesses spend it. And, they spend it on capital goods that either expand their capacity to produce, or decease their present costs of production. Either way, that is good for everyone. It means more jobs, and better jobs. But this saving is derided as not being “productive.”

    As a conclusion Hazlitt tells us:

    And this is our lesson in its most generalized form. For many things that seem to be true when we concentrate on a single economic group are seen to be illusions when the interests of everyone, as consumer no less than producer, are considered.

    To see the problem as a whole, and not in fragments: that is the goal of economic science.

    This is a very valuable book which cuts through the fog and haze of economics and public policy and lets us understand the true effects of our government’s policies.

    An excerpt of this book can be read at One Lesson.

  • Laws that do harm

    As we approach another birthday of Milton Friedman, here’s his column from Newsweek in 1982 that explains that despite good intentions, the result of government intervention often harms those it is intended to help.

    There is a sure-fire way to predict the consequences of a government social program adopted to achieve worthy ends. Find out what the well-meaning, public-interested persons who advocated its adoption expected it to accomplish. Then reverse those expectations. You will have an accurate prediction of actual results.

    To illustrate on the broadest level, idealists from Marx to Lenin and the subsequent fellow travelers claimed that communism would enhance both freedom and prosperity and lead to the “withering away of the state.” We all know the results in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China: misery, slavery and a more powerful and all-encompassing government than the world had ever seen.

    Idealists, from Harold Laski to Jawaharlal Nehru, promised the suffering Indian masses that “democratic economic planning” would abolish famines, bring material prosperity, resolve age-old conflicts between the castes and eliminate inequality. The result has been continued deprivation for the masses, continued violence between the castes and widened inequality.

    To come down to less sweeping cases rent control has been promoted for millenniums as a way to hold down rents and ensure more housing for the disadvantaged. Wherever it has been adopted, the actual result has been precisely the opposite for all but a few favored tenants. Rent control has encouraged the wasteful use of housing space and has discouraged the building of more housing units. As a result, rents actually paid — whether legally or under the table — by all tenants except those who do not move have skyrocketed. And even the tenants who do not move complain about not being able to.

    Over two years ago, when the San Francisco supervisors were contemplating a form of rent control, I republished in a local paper a NEWSWEEK column of mine on rent control, prefacing it with the comment that only a “fool or a knave” could support rent control after examining the massive evidence on its effects. Needless to say, that did not prevent the majority of a board of supervisors, consisting of neither fools nor knaves, from enacting the ordinance I objected to. And the lessons of experience have not prevented the adoption of rent control in other cities — or the repetition of that same experience.

    Urban renewal programs were urged to cure “urban blight” and improve the housing available to the poor. The result was a “Federal Bulldozer,” as Martin Anderson titled his searching examination of urban renewal. More dwelling units were torn down than were constructed. The new units constructed were mostly for middle- and upper-income classes. Urban blight was simply shifted and made worse by the still higher density created elsewhere by removing the poor from the “renewed” area.

    In education, professionalization, integration, bilingualism, massive doses of federal assistance — all have been promoted to improve the quality of schooling and reduce racial tension and discrimination. The result was predictable: a drastic lowering of educational performance and an increase in actual segregation of races, at least in the North.

    President Nixon introduced price controls on Aug. 15, 1971, to eliminate inflation, which at the time was running at about 4 to 5 percent per year. When controls ended in 1974, inflation soared into double digits.

    The Interstate Commerce Commission was promoted in the 1880s and 1890s by the Ralph Naders of the day to discipline monopolistic railroads and benefit their customers. One group in today’s Nader conglomerate has published a devastating study of the ICC demonstrating that it strengthened the monopoly power of the railroads, and later of trucking. The users of transportation have had the dubious privilege of paying higher prices for poorer service.

    Need I go on? I challenge my readers to name a government social program that has achieved the results promised by its well-meaning and public-interested proponents. I keep repeating “well-meaning and public-interested proponents” because they have generally been the dupes of others who had very clear self-interested motives and often did achieve the results that they intended — the railroads in the 1890s for example.

    The amazing thing to me is the continued gullibility of intellectuals and the public. I wish someone would explain that to me. Is it simply because no one has given this widely documented generalization a catchy name – like … (suggestions welcome)?

  • Wichita airport statistics: the visualization

    In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.
    — Frederic Bastiat

    While the program to reduce airfares in Wichita has probably met that goal, there have been consequences.

    In particular, the availability of air travel in Wichita is lower than it has been, and the trend is in the wrong direction. In some aspects the Wichita trend mirrors that of the nation and other airports, and in others Wichita is falling farther behind.

    wichita-airport-dashboard-2013-07-29

    The illustration nearby (click it for a larger version) is a static snapshot of data for the nation as a whole (blue line), Wichita (brown), and a few other airports in cities that Wichita’s Visioneering effort identifies as our peers. For each series, I show the percentage change over time, so that all series operate on the same scale. Data is through the end of 2012.

    Of particular concern should be the trend in departures and seats. Both are declining in Wichita, as they are also for the nation. But the gap between Wichita and the nation is widening in recent years.

    This trend is an example of unintended consequences of government intervention and regulation. The Affordable Airfares program imposes a rough form of price control on airfares in Wichita. If the program didn’t do that — and it appears it succeeds at this goal — then there would be no point in having the program.

    The inevitable effect of price controls is that less is supplied, compared to what would have been supplied. This economic phenomenon is reliable and predictable. While travelers prefer low air fares to high, this is not the only consideration. For those who need to travel on short notice, the availability of flights is very important, and on this measure, Wichita is doing much worse than the nation.

    For more about the subsidy programs in use at the Wichita airport, see these articles:

    Wichita flight count continues decline. “A program designed to bring low air fares to Wichita appears to meet that goal, but the unintended and inevitable consequences of the program are not being recognized. In particular, the number of flights available at the Wichita airport continues to decline.”

    Affordable Airfares audit embarrassing to Wichita. “An audit of Affordable Airfares produced by the Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit is an embarrassment to City of Wichita elected officials and staff, the Kansas Regional Area Economic Partnership, and the Wichita State University Center for Economic Development and Business Research.”

    Mixed message on Southwest subsidies. “Now that Southwest Airlines has announced that it will offer service in Wichita, the question is this: Will Southwest tap the subsidy?”

    To help you explore this data, I’ve created an interactive visualization. Click here to open the visualization in a new window. You may add or remove any number of airports. Or, if you’d like to watch a video, click on Wichita Airport statistics: The video.

    Data is from Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), which is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation. Visualization created by myself using Tableau Public.

  • Friedman: The fallacy of the welfare state

    As we approach another birthday of Milton Friedman, here’s an insightful passage from the book he wrote with his wife Rose: Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. It explains why government spending is wasteful, how it leads to corruption, how it often does not benefit the people it was intended, and how the pressure for more spending is always present.

    A simple classification of spending shows why that process leads to undesirable results. When you spend, you may spend your own money or someone else’s; and you may spend for the benefit of yourself or someone else. Combining these two pairs of alternatives gives four possibilities summarized in the following simple table:

    friedman-spending-categories-2013-07

    Category I in the table refers to your spending your own money on yourself. You shop in a supermarket, for example. You clearly have a strong incentive both to economize and to get as much value as you can for each dollar you do spend.

    Category II refers to your spending your own money on someone else. You shop for Christmas or birthday presents. You have the same incentive to economize as in Category I but not the same incentive to get full value for your money, at least as judged by the tastes of the recipient. You will, of course, want to get something the recipient will like — provided that it also makes the right impression and does not take too much time and effort. (If, indeed, your main objective were to enable the recipient to get as much value as possible per dollar, you would give him cash, converting your Category II spending to Category I spending by him.)

    Category III refers to your spending someone else’s money on yourself — lunching on an expense account, for instance. You have no strong incentive to keep down the cost of the lunch, but you do have a strong incentive to get your money’s worth.

    Category IV refers to your spending someone else’s money on still another person. You are paying for someone else’s lunch out of an expense account. You have little incentive either to economize or to try to get your guest the lunch that he will value most highly. However, if you are having lunch with him, so that the lunch is a mixture of Category III and Category IV, you do have a strong incentive to satisfy your own tastes at the sacrifice of his, if necessary.

    All welfare programs fall into either Category III — for example, Social Security which involves cash payments that the recipient is free to spend as he may wish; or Category IV — for example, public housing; except that even Category IV programs share one feature of Category III, namely, that the bureaucrats administering the program partake of the lunch; and all Category III programs have bureaucrats among their recipients.

    In our opinion these characteristics of welfare spending are the main source of their defects.

    Legislators vote to spend someone else’s money. The voters who elect the legislators are in one sense voting to spend their own money on themselves, but not in the direct sense of Category I spending. The connection between the taxes any individual pays and the spending he votes for is exceedingly loose. In practice, voters, like legislators, are inclined to regard someone else as paying for the programs the legislator votes for directly and the voter votes for indirectly. Bureaucrats who administer the programs are also spending someone else’s money. Little wonder that the amount spent explodes.

    The bureaucrats spend someone else’s money on someone else. Only human kindness, not the much stronger and more dependable spur of self-interest, assures that they will spend the money in the way most beneficial to the recipients. Hence the wastefulness and ineffectiveness of the spending.

    But that is not all. The lure of getting someone else’s money is strong. Many, including the bureaucrats administering the programs, will try to get it for themselves rather than have it go to someone else. The temptation to engage in corruption, to cheat, is strong and will not always be resisted or frustrated. People who resist the temptation to cheat will use legitimate means to direct the money to themselves. They will lobby for legislation favorable to themselves, for rules from which they can benefit. The bureaucrats administering the programs will press for better pay and perquisites for themselves — an outcome that larger programs will facilitate.

    The attempt by people to divert government expenditures to themselves has two consequences that may not be obvious. First, it explains why so many programs tend to benefit middle- and upper-income groups rather than the poor for whom they are supposedly intended. The poor tend to lack not only the skills valued in the market, but also the skills required to be successful in the political scramble for funds. Indeed, their disadvantage in the political market is likely to be greater than in the economic. Once well-meaning reformers who may have helped to get a welfare measure enacted have gone on to their next reform, the poor are left to fend for themselves and they will almost always he overpowered by the groups that have already demonstrated a greater capacity to take advantage of available opportunities.

    The second consequence is that the net gain to the recipients of the transfer will be less than the total amount transferred. If $100 of somebody else’s money is up for grabs, it pays to spend up to $100 of your own money to get it. The costs incurred to lobby legislators and regulatory authorities, for contributions to political campaigns, and for myriad other items are a pure waste — harming the taxpayer who pays and benefiting no one. They must be subtracted from the gross transfer to get the net gain — and may, of course, at times exceed the gross transfer, leaving a net loss, not gain.

    These consequences of subsidy seeking also help to explain the pressure for more and more spending, more and more programs. The initial measures fail to achieve the objectives of the well-meaning reformers who sponsored them. They conclude that not enough has been done and seek additional programs. They gain as allies both people who envision careers as bureaucrats administering the programs and people who believe that they can tap the money to be spent.

    Category IV spending tends also to corrupt the people involved. All such programs put some people in a position to decide what is good for other people. The effect is to instill in the one group a feeling of almost God-like power; in the other, a feeling of childlike dependence. The capacity of the beneficiaries for independence, for making their own decisions, atrophies through disuse. In addition to the waste of money, in addition to the failure to achieve the intended objectives, the end result is to rot the moral fabric that holds a decent society together.

    Another by-product of Category III or IV spending has the same effect. Voluntary gifts aside, you can spend someone else’s money only by taking it away as government does. The use of force is therefore at the very heart of the welfare state — a bad means that tends to corrupt the good ends. That is also the reason why the welfare state threatens our freedom so seriously.

  • Wichita airfares, on the rise

    Airplane

    A survey by travel website CheapFlights.com shows that airfares in Wichita have both fallen and risen in recent years, even though the City of Wichita, Sedgwick County, and the State of Kansas collectively spend millions each year to keep airfares low.

    The survey, according to a news release, ranks airports by “averaging the prices our users found during the month of June when searching for flights to popular domestic and international destinations like Miami, Honolulu, London and Cancun.”

    The news release warns that “These rankings can shift dramatically from year to year and prices fluctuate frequently on specific routes.”

    Since this is the fourth year for this survey, I thought it would be interesting to see how airfares in Wichita have fared over the timeframe of this survey. An interactive visualization is presented below.

    wichita-airfares-compared-2013-07

    Here is an illustration of Wichita airfares compared to the other airports included in the survey, which for 2013 included the 101 most popular airports. You can see that based on the data gathered for this study, the average airfare declined, but then rose. Wichita’s rank among airports rose, accordingly. (In the airfare rankings in this survey, a higher rank means higher airfares, relative to other airports.)

    This data should inspire us to re-examine whether the taxpayer-funded effort to reduce airfares in Wichita has produced the desired result.

    There have been other audits or studies which have questioned the efficacy of Wichita’s airport subsidy program. See Affordable Airfares audit embarrassing to Wichita for an example.

    I’ve created an interactive visualization from this data. Use the visualization below, or click here to open the visualization in a new window, which may work better for some users. Click on an airport name to highlight its fares against other airports. Use Ctrl+click to add other airports.

    Data is from CheapClights.com. Visualization created by myself using Tableau Public.

  • Local economic development incentives: The economic perspective

    Recently Russell S. Sobel, Ph.D., who is Visiting Scholar in Entrepreneurship in the School of Business Administration at The Citadel spoke in Wichita on the topic “Economic Development Incentives: A Necessary Evil?” A video presentation of his talk follows.

    Sobel is the author of many books and publications, including Unleashing Capitalism and the popular university textbook Economics: Private and Public Choice, 14th edition. Video production is by Paul Soutar.

  • Business tax credits more desired than zero tax rates

    Economic developmentA Kansas business welfare program is more attractive and valuable than elimination of the Kansas corporate income tax, at least for some influential corporations in Kansas. The program is High Performance Incentive Program (HPIP), which grants tax credits in exchange for capital investment.

    In April Dr. Art Hall of the Center for Applied Economics at the Kansas University School of Business delivered a presentation on Kansas tax reform, and he explained the situation (video here):

    There is something called an HPIP investment tax credit. It stands for High Performance Incentive Program. This is a very valuable tax credit to corporations. But, you don’t get it automatically. You have to apply to the state. Only about 100 or 125 of these credits are given out each year. It’s about $50 to $60 million per year. It’s a very large number. Back in 2011, … the plan was to get rid of all of these special deals, especially this one credit, and we’re going to reduce all the rates.

    The corporate sector — some very influential people in the corporate sector — did not want that at all. They went to the mat, hard. … The point is, there was an effort to reduce corporate income tax. The corporations, at least a very strong constituent sector, didn’t want it. They wanted their credit.

    In other words, the business welfare benefits these corporations — many thought to be in the aerospace industry — receive from the state is greater than the Kansas income tax they pay. That’s the only conclusion we can draw from their choice of favoring the HPIP credits over elimination of their Kansas income tax.

    A table from Hall’s paper Embracing Dynamism: The Next Phase in Kansas Economic Development Policy holds calculations that reveal this effect.

    hpip-credits-example-2013-07

    The 11.92% that is highlighted in yellow shows the deformation of the business investment and tax landscape that causes some corporations to prefer HPIP tax credits over zero tax rates. Each row in the table represents a different scenario, one being retaining the HPIP credit. Columns represent various amounts of investment. It is in the column for the largest amount of investment that HPIP is most valuable, based on expected rate of return for the investment. HPIP is also more valuable than the strategy in any other row, considering the large investment column. HPIP, we can see, favors large corporations over small, as it is most valuable when making large investments.

    A problem, as Hall told the audience in the video, is that the HPIP is not given automatically to all companies that make capital investments. The credit must be applied for, various conditions must be met, and approval received.

    This system of selecting which companies receive targeted economic development investment in Kansas is contrary to market principals. The state, rather than markets, is making investment decisions. It’s also contrary to Hall’s economic dynamism concept explained in the paper referenced above. In this idea, the goal of the state is to encourage a large number of business startups each year, and then nurture conditions where all have a chance to thrive. Many will not survive, but some will. We don’t know which firms will thrive, so it’s important to treat all firms equally and give all a chance.

    Programs like HPIP are contrary to this philosophy, and instead concentrate the state’s investments in existing, often large, companies — the companies that make the large capital investments for which HPIP returns the most favorable financial results. This is also an illustration of the difference between a business-friendly environment and capitalism.